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Day/Night theme, AJAX, responsive design

We just updated our website, PorkyGames.com, which is made in PHP, but has some awesome Javascript features:

- It uses AJAX (scroll down to see it in action)
- Responsive design (try resizing the window - it's calculated with Javascript)
- Day/Night theme (we're quite proud of this; choose with the buttons on the right side)
... notice that the Day/Night theme is auto-generated with Javascript for every reload !

Wow, I’m kind of clobbered over the head with all these animated effects. But let me start with something simple: You forgot to specify a page background color. Don’t assume everybody has the default white set as background, people can and do change that in their browser settings (as well as text and link colors and font family). If you want your styles to prevail you have to set them explicitly.

Now to the actual UI/UX issues:

First of all, your site doesn’t work well without JS. I know, there will be people that question my opinion and say “everybody has JS enabled anyway and those who don’t expect a crappy experience”, and I have made my points in numerous discussions so I’m not going over this in detail again. However, let me just say that there is no reason why your site would only work properly with JS enabled, it doesn’t require substantially more effort to make it work without JS so why not do it?

That said, your site also isn’t actually responsive in contemporary terms. If I resize my browser window the right box (which is supposedly a Facebook widget but is consequently blocked by my Ghostery plugin) is moving over the content, making it look bad and be essentially unusable.

Now, when I actually enable JavaScript I’m immediately confronted with another obstacle:What in the world is the point of these white circles right on top of the content? They even make the page barely usable because not only do they distract from the content, you can’t even click any items that are underneath them.

Then, what’s the point of the sliding motion when you load the page or when you scroll down and new items are loaded? People don’t go to your site because they want to see quirky animations and effects, they go to your site for your content. They don’t say: “Hey, I liked that funny sliding motion of the content each time the page is loaded. I’m gonna come back just for this!”, they either say: “Hey, that site has awesome games, I’m gonna come back some time.” or: “That site is unusable and annoying, I’m going elsewhere.”
So, the basic principle of web design is to design around the content, not design for the design. The best design is one that doesn’t get in the way but is actually even not noticed particularly, so to speak.

Also, your day and night functionality isn’t working, I get a JS error saying “SecurityError: The operation is insecure.” and pointing to return localStorage.theme;. Perhaps that is because I have cookies disabled/blocked by default, too, but there is more to that which I’m not feeling like explaining just yet. It’s more a matter of the approach to the whole site concept/design in terms of user interaction — and there is yet a lot to do.